Tuesday, June 13, 2006

When hiring a librarian, many academic libraries try to fill part of the obligatory eight-hour interview with a presentation by the candidate. More often than not, the candidate is asked to "demonstrate a database." Zzz. When inviting candidates to your library to interview, make things more challenging by asking them to...

Speed-weed your ready reference collection.

Work a real-life reference desk shift... blind-folded.

Make a halfway decent pot of coffee... then catalog it.

Play a game of Trivial Pursuit/Scrabble against your most cantankerous faculty member.

Some years ago I did, in several venues, explain LC's early Collaborative Digital Reference Project to assembled reference librarians with a brief (not sure it was "interpretive") dance. Reference librarians seemed to get it. Now that CDRS has become QuiestionPoint, however, I don't think I'd dare try it. That dance would take a troup on the order of Cirque du Soleil, I think.

I was told that I lost out on a position because I refused to do a canned twenty minute instruction session. Instead I wanted to discuss why teaching subject and genre searching in MLA Bibliography would create confusion in the mind of the average undergrad and suggested alternate search techniques. Needless to say that I probably wouldn't have fit in to the culture anyway.